Mobius Life
by RoseOfAberlone
Summary: Lillian was a law student with family and close friends, so what made her abandon her old life to start a new one at the Two Towns? And what would life be like if it followed the parameters of the game?
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Note:  
>None of the in-game characters belong to me, and the game world does not either. Those are owned by Marvelous andor Natsume. However, the plot is mine! Also, Jenny, Lillian's parents, and other folk she interacts with before arriving at the Two Towns are original, if relatively unimportant, characters. _

_I also am not a doctor and nothing in this story should be construed as medical advice. I can only offer my personal advice, which is "Go see a doctor if you are worried about something."_

_This story is being simultaneously published to the Ushi no Tane forums under the name of "Clove" and is dedicated to my fellow Ushians. I hope you enjoy it!_

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><p><strong>Chapter One<strong>  
><em>(In which Lillian has a headache)<em>

She had been feeling unwell, but she hadn't been feeling that unwell. Her main complaint was a headache that she'd had almost every day for a year.

"Caffeine sensitivity," said her mother.  
>"Overwork," said her father.<br>"Are you still talking about that?" said her best friend and roommate, Jenny. "Go to the doctor if you're so worried."

So Lillian had alternately tried quitting caffeine, and drinking more of it. Neither helped. She considered slacking off a little in her studies, but she was in her second year of law school, affectionately known as the "work you to death" year. Her scholarship depended on her class rank, and she couldn't afford to slip even a little, however much her father told her to take it easy. As for going to the doctor…

"What would I say? 'Oh help, I have a headache?' They'll just tell me to take some ibuprofen. So forget that and please pass the ibuprofen," she told Jenny, who did, and Lillian decided never to mention the headaches again.

She was halfway through her second semester when the dizziness crept up on her, and she began getting nauseous.

"Are you… pregnant?" whispered her best friend, who was holding back her hair. "Oh my god, what are you going to do?"

"NO, Jenny, I'm not pregnant!" snapped Lillian. "I haven't… I mean there isn't anyone… I mean that one guy in my Evidence class is awfully cute but he never even … I mean, It's just stress, okay?"

"Well, that's an awful lot of 'stress' coming up," Jenny said after a short pause. "Maybe you should lay off the ibuprofen, and go see a doctor."

"I don't. Have time. To see. A doctor," said Lillian, with exaggerated patience. "I have a twenty page memo due in the next week, and I can hardly keep up with the readings in my other classes. I'll go in the summer if I'm not better. Okay? You worry too much."

Jenny frowned at the crown of Lillian's head, but dropped the subject. Instead she bought Lillian a bottle of vitamins and a tin of tea, and left both by Lillian's computer. There wasn't anything else she could do.

She didn't know about the dreams Lillian was having of a green-haired lady who had a faint shine around her, because Lillian never mentioned it. Lillian was too pragmatic think much about nonsense that came from her unconscious mind. She could never hear what the shining woman was saying so urgently, anyway.

At least, not until two weeks before her finals started


	2. Chapter 2

_Author's Note:  
>Lillian and the green-haired woman do not belong to me, and the game world does not either. Those are owned by Marvelous andor Natsume. However, the plot is mine, as is Jenny. This story is also published on the Ushi no Tane forums under the name "Clove" and is dedicated to my fellow Ushians, and also to my little sister, who got me addicted to HM in the first place. _

_I also am not a doctor and nothing in this story should be construed as medical advice. I can only offer my personal advice, which is "Go see a doctor if you are worried about something."_

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><p><strong>Chapter<strong> **Two**  
><em>(In which Jenny wins an argument) <em>

_The dream began as it always did, with Lillian standing on top of a mountain in a beautiful little glade. She looked into a pool of water crystal clear and unfathomably deep. She threw a strawberry into the water, which floated (against all odds) on the surface before being abruptly pulled under with a little glooop. And a shining woman with long, green, intricately styled hair bound materialized in a swirl of water, to hover over the glassy surface of the pond. In keeping with the general inexplicability, she appeared to be completely dry_

_Her face was made for laughing, but she looked grim. She opened her mouth and this time - this first time - Lillian heard what she was saying._

_In a voice like wind and bells and summer, the goddess said, "Lillian. Your life is over."_

_And the flowers and plants around the pool suddenly grew hodgepodge and beyond control. In the place of the goddess hovered a skull Lillian knew to be her own, which suddenly splashed into the pond and floated, staring into the sky._

Lillian bolted from her bed and into the kitchen, where Jenny was pouring her first cup of coffee. Jenny raised her eyebrows and said, "Good morning! What's wrong? You know our Business Entities lecture was cancelled, right? You aren't running late."

"Oh, I…" Lillian said, rubbing her eyes and trying to get hold of her pounding heart. "No, it was just a dream."

"Nightmares?"

"Well… it wasn't really very scary anyway," said Lillian, peering into a cupboard. "Just some lady hovering over a lake telling me that I'm about to die. Haha! I can't believe it made me panic like that." She reached for a mug, missed, and rubbed her eyes again. "Everything's blurry. Must still be some sleep in my eyes."

Jenny looked at her, frowned, and peered at her face more closely.

"What?" Lillian said, leaning away.

"Get dressed. We're leaving."

"What? Where are we going?"

"We are going," said Jenny as she put down her mug and crossed her arms, "to the hospital."

"We are NOT going to the hospital."

"We are going to the hospital. We are going there now. You are getting worse, and you are going to see a doctor today."

"We are not going to the hospital over some dream!" exclaimed Lillian. "Seriously, you worry too much, I'm fine!"

Jenny took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Go get dressed, or I will stuff you in the car wearing nothing but your night clothes. We are not going because you had a nightmare. We are going because you've been dizzy and vomiting and I'm pretty sure you're still having headaches every day, aren't you?"

Lillian managed to look defiant, ashamed, and scared all at the same time.

"And now on top of all that," Jenny said, "One of your pupils is much larger than the other. I'm pretty sure that's a really bad sign, however you look at it. So we'll let a doctor tell us who is worrying the right amount. Get dressed."

Lillian opened her mouth to say, petulantly, "You're not my mom, I can take care of myself," but she looked at Jenny's stony, stubborn face, and swallowed her words. Instead, she went into the bathroom and checked her eyes in the mirror.

Then she got dressed, tossed her car key to Jenny, and climbed into the passenger seat without saying another word.


	3. Chapter 3

_Author's Note: As usual, Lillian doesn't belong to me, she belongs to Natsume or Marvelous. Everyone else in this chapter is an original character, and of course, the plot is mine. _

_This chapter was very difficult for me to write. I may edit it later, but for now, the story must go on!_

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><p><strong>Chapter 3<br>**_(In which Lillian breaks a young doctor's heart)_

Lillian huddled under her blanket, staring at the little lumps her feet made. She had a private room, and warm blankets against the antiseptic chill. There was also a monitor that gave a comforting little beep every time her heart beat, marking her time. Earlier she had insisted that her parents leave, and Jenny leave, and the chaplain leave, and the nurses leave, and the doctors leave, and the whole messy-whirlwind of everyone just leave, and then she sat alone in the dark, staring at her feet, and listening to her heart.

Things had happened too fast once they got to the hospital, and Lillian bitterly resented Jenny for dragging her there. Lillian wished with a bone-deep ache that she could go back to this morning, before she knew. She wanted even more to go back to last night and forget her homework, call up all her friends to have pizza and drinks and be wildly irresponsible. But that was impossible, of course, and she began to think cautiously about her day.

Lillian and Jenny had been waiting in the emergency room for two hours, passing time by confessing not-secret crushes on various professors. Finally a nurse came for Lillian, and when he took her back to the examination room, she grabbed Jenny's hand in panic, and so Jenny had gone too. The nurse took Lillian's vitals, peered at her eyes and gave her a bucket to throw up into when the dizziness came on again. And the nurse kept asking, did you fall, did you hit your head? and Lillian was forced to say, no, she'd been like this for a while, and then she had to explain about the year-long headache, and the nausea, and then this morning -

"- and then this morning, her eyes were like this," finished Jenny, when Lillian had stopped talking, unable to add that final, damning symptom, because the nurse looked so worried. And thinking back on it, Lillian figured that's probably the first time she really knew that something horrible was going on, when an emergency room nurse looked _worried_ because of a headache.

The nurse had gone to get a doctor, rushing out so quickly a little breeze followed him to the door. But he had paused long enough to say, "You'll probably be here quite a while." Jenny and Lillian looked at each other, a while hanging in the air between them, and Jenny stood up abruptly. "I'd better call your parents, let them know you're here."

Lillian wanted to cry _wait don't you leave me too_, but she couldn't make her mouth form the words, and she just nodded, and was left alone for just five minutes that stretched themselves into an hour as she tried to look at the tongue depressors and the cotton balls and the gloves. And then the end of the five minutes snapped itself back into its proper time frame as Jenny and the doctor arrived at the same time, both breathless, both saying "oh excuse me, I'm so sorry" as they tried to get in the door at the same time. It would have been funny, except it wasn't, at all.

The doctor was a resident in a short white coat, only a year or two older than Lillian. He introduced himself as Dr. Mbanefo. As he looked at her eyes and listened to her symptoms, he felt her head as if she maybe she had hit her head so hard she forgot about it. Then he called his senior doctor, who had a proper long white coat and who needed to hear the symptoms for herself, and to look at her eyes, to feel her skull. The attending said, "Good job, Doctor, you are quite correct," and looked at him, gesturing that he should continue. Doctor Mbanefo sat down and folded his hands together, and took a breath. Then he said rather briskly, "Well, we're concerned that there may be something wrong with your brain, so we need to take an MRI, and then we'll know more."

It had taken another few hours to be able to get the MRI, and Lillian's parents had arrived shortly after it was over, faces drawn in worry. Jenny was still there, even though she was missing two classes, and she pretended not to hear whenever Lillian feebly protested that she should get to class. And so it was the four of them sitting in a room silently, everyone pretending that _they_ weren't worried because everything was going to be just fine.

Then they all heard a whispered conversation from behind the closed door, which ended in a hissed, "No, you have to learn how to discuss these things with patients, just get in there already!" Lillian and Jenny exchanged a wary glance, and Dr. Mbanefo and the attending had walked in again. And that's when everything got really blurry for Lillian, who could only register the words _brain tumor_ and _possibly cancer_.

There was another MRI of her whole body, but they didn't find any more tumors. A nurse came and took a lumbar puncture, which was painful, and Lillian was given a room and told "You must certainly stay the night," and then there was more waiting. Lillian's mother remembered that no one had eaten yet although it was almost evening, and brought everyone hamburgers. Everyone ate them dutifully and and tried to make awkward, halting conversation. But they had figured out how to sit on the hospital bed so they could surround Lillian, and they all leaned against each other.

Then Dr. Mbanefo came back in again with a different senior doctor. Lillian looked at him, saw how he looked so tired and sad and grey, and she realized that he had been working so long the shifts had changed, but he was still there specifically for what would happen next. The two doctors looked at each other, silently trying to figure out who was going to say what had to be said. Lillian looked to Dr. Mbanefo, and thought, _you've been here the whole time, I'd rather hear it from you_. Dr. Mbanefo looked back at her, seemed to understand. He pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat down heavily, looked at the scared clutch of people. Jenny and Lillian's parents drew in more closely around her, as if they could protect her from what he would say next, make it not be true.

Once again he hesitated just a little, and then he said, "Unfortunately, our fears have been confirmed. Lillian, you have a malignant brain cancer, with a couple of tumors in your brain."

He paused to let that sink in. Everyone was quiet, aghast. Then Lillian's ears started to roar and the room spun around, and everyone broke into questions that Lillian didn't hear. She could only hear Dr. Mbanefo, as if he were the only person in the room.

"Surgery is a possibility, but it is horribly risky because of the location of some of the tumors. If we do it, she may lose a lot of cognitive function, and she may also lose her sight, and she may lose her ability to speak. But there is another tumor that we cannot remove, because it is too close to the brain stem, and we would almost certainly kill her directly."

Dr. Mbanefo paused for an unheard question, and answered, "Chemotherapy and radiation are another option. We can be very aggressive and if she tolerates it well it's not impossible that we can kill it before - " he broke off and swallowed.

_Before the treatment kills me or the cancer does_, Lillian finished in her head. She looked up. "Excuse me, Doctor. What chance of recovery do I have?"

Dr. Mbanefo wet his lips and looked like he wished she had not asked. "Well, we must remember that you are very young, and very strong, and anything is possible, but for this type of cancer at the stage you are at," he looked away and forced out the rest, "less than 5% of people survive two years, even with treatment."

Lillian nodded like she had been expecting this, feeling icy calm. "And in your professional opinion, how long do I have?"

Dr. Mbanefo swallowed, and shot a look at his attending physician that clearly said _I can't do this yet and if you force me to answer this question I swear I will quit medicine altogether._ The attending shot a look back that said _I know how you feel_.

"Lillian," he said, with utmost gentleness, "Even with the most aggressive treatment we can give you, we think you probably have less than six months to live."


End file.
